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Dear Friends: I am resubmitting this blog posting from last year. Hard to believe a year has gone by! I am hoping you all find some peace and serenity during this season of giving thanks. -SL

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Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, and my
affection for it grows as I age. Perhaps
it’s the relative lack of commercialism associated with it, or the fond
memories from childhood of an idyllic feast at my grandparents’ house, a day
when for a few hours at least we could relax into the moment, watch the
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, a
Charlie Brown TV special, and forget the stress and pain of life at home. My
grandmother’s house was a sanctuary, and for that day, all was right with the
world. I can still smell the turkey roasting, and the smell of the wool rugs in
her house, and hear the crackle of a wood fire.

Today, though, it is not a holiday completely free from
stress: I have to confess I am stressing a little about getting that perfect
free range, hormone- free, guilt-free, heritage organic bird for the crowd of
people coming over this Thanksgiving day! I italicized “perfect” because
therein lies the source of my stress – this belief that my happiness and the
success of the day depends on something external to me (and out of my control)
being perfect. Remember when the only
option was a Butterball and we were all really happy with that?

I have also noticed that my cooking has never come close to
duplicating what my French-heritage grandmother, who we called “Mémère”,
was able to turn out. The preparation of
the turkey, dinde (pronounced “dahnd”)
in French and the special French-Canadian pork stuffing that went with it, was
a two day affair and a labor of love for my grandmother. She would attend to its preparation like a
mother would attend to a new born. She
was not rushed or hurried. She would
slow roast a 20 or 25 lb. bird overnight, waking up every hour or so to baste
it. It was melt-in-your mouth moist, and
the drippings created the most flavorful gravy I have ever tasted. Being greeted at the door by her with a hug
and kiss and a blast of hot air, fragrant with cooking smells, is something I
can still relive if I close my eyes. My siblings and I have tried to replicate
the meal, using my mémère’s recipes, but something is always, somehow, missing – not quite right. Did she leave out an essential ingredient in
the recipe? If I had her 1950’s stove
would the outcome improve? Was I just not showing enough devotion to the bird?
Did I really need to get up every hour and baste? Was the food just more flavorful back then in
rural Maine?

Or perhaps my mind is simply engaging in phenomena that the
Buddha described many centuries ago. He
described this feeling of pervasive unsatisfactoriness, or dukkha, of things being not
quite right. My mind clings to
wanting things to remain the same, as they were in my youth, with memories that
become embellished with story and imbued with meaning and which are sweetened
and romanticized over time. My mind
tells me “You want that! You want to recapture that wonderful feeling!” -- a feeling which may never have been all
that wonderful to begin with, and which may be entirely fabricated, a “story” I
tell myself. It is the phenomenon of craving, that unavoidable feature of the
human condition.

My inability to recreate that experience of childhood is not
because of the quality of the turkey, or the stove, or my own lack of skill as
a chef. It is because this is how the mind is – we want and
are never quite satisfied, or, if our desires are met, the feeling of
satisfaction is short lived and we are soon pursuing the next thing in an effort to fill the void inside, to
satisfy the cycle or wheel of craving, known to Buddhists as samsāra. As Sogyal Rinpoche points out in his forward to The
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, we live in a capitalistic
society that understands this at a deep level, and enables our wanting with a
never ending supply of the new, improved, must-have shiny objects.

It may also be that my grandmother’s “superior” turkey was
the product of her being patient, and fully present during the process of
cooking. I may be totally fabricating
this too, but the pace of life felt slower back then, with fewer LCD screens
demanding our attention, fewer distractions.
My grandmother cooked mindfully, with a Zen-like focus and patience,
knowing it took time to create a meal properly.
She used no blender or Cuisinart chopper to cut the onions for the
stuffing; she grated each one by hand on a special tool that led to much
shedding of tears but also much shredding of onion with the correct
consistency. Spices were measured out in
her hand, not with a measuring spoon or cup.
This process required careful attention – attention was needed to avoid grating
one’s knuckles or overdoing the pepper.
I know that when I cook (or do anything for that matter), I am
frequently focused on getting through a task as quickly as possible so that I
can move on to the next task. Am I
really cooking (or doing anything) at my best if I’m already on to the next
thing?

In addition to being propelled by wanting more, I have
learned that I am also propelled by an inner disquiet, a nagging thought that I
am not quite right or not quite
enough. The inner dialogue and logic goes something like this: If I can be perfect, or make the perfect
meal, or raise the perfect kids, then I will finally feel like I am enough,
that I have arrived, and that others will appreciate me in the way that I
desire to be appreciated. This faulty
logic and way of viewing myself leads to perfectionism, narcissism -- and
exhaustion! Perfection is an impossible goal and a merciless taskmaster. And experience has showed me that no matter
how many flawless dinner parties I orchestrate, I will still be left with that
nagging doubt about whether it (or I) had been good enough. Tara Brach, in her teachings on radical acceptance,
calls this the “trance of unworthiness”.
And many of us walk around in this trance, bearing the heavy yoke of samsāra,
all our lives.

Sometimes we are lucky and wake up from the trance. Through
my mindfulness meditation practice I have learned to recognize these moments of
feeling not quite right or enough, and better yet, I have learned to chuckle
and smile at myself when I catch myself feeling frazzled or stressed to produce
something “perfectly”. I have come to a somewhat tentative understanding that I
am enough just as I am, and worthy of love just as I am. The perfect turkey or
spotless house or fashionable wardrobe cannot do that for me; only I can do
that for me. Happiness and self-esteem
are an inside job, and not dependent on external things. And practicing loving kindness (metta) with myself, helps me recognize
and open my heart to others who are also suffering in our oh-so-human way.

And I do not practice self-acceptance, mindfulness, and
loving kindness perfectly. Instead I
have learned to see beauty in the imperfections around me, and to learn from my
mistakes. Without my mistakes I do not grow and learn. I owe a lot to my
mistakes, and so have come to love and accept them, too.

So as Thanksgiving approaches I give thanks for this
practice of mindfulness and for my teachers’ wisdom. I feel gratitude for the ability to sometimes
recognize when I am telling myself “stories” or engaging in wanting or
craving. I feel gratitude for this new
ability to be with myself in a loving, compassionate way. I feel grateful for
the lessons in mindfulness that my grandmother taught me, that life is worth
savoring like carefully weighed out handfuls of spices. I am grateful that I
can celebrate my favorite holiday with friends and family and have food to eat,
however imperfect it may be. Grateful that I am and have enough – actually, I
am blessed with such incredible riches in my life, I just need to stop and take
notice. Through mindfulness the act of stressing about the turkey seems so
unimportant. That I HAVE a turkey and
friends with which to share it is extraordinary, and for that I give thanks
with a very, very full heart.

And with any luck I’ll remember this when I start planning
that perfect Christmas tree.